Thursday 25 May 2023

Taking a break from painting

In January I had friends staying over and was busy doing things so took a break from painting. I still stored up words I wanted to use in new collages and I had two more Japanese sayings to employ but stopped trying to put them to use.

At that point it was about nine weeks since I started making watercolours and adding collage to them but I felt as though progress had been made, the works I made at the end of that interval were much more complex and considered than what I made at the beginning. 

Nine weeks doesn’t seem like a long time but in our age of abundance a day is forever, we’re given such a wide range of activities to embrace or reject.

In May, five months after that first break I was going back to sonnets not having worked on any for a long time. Having a range of creative activities to rely on in order to feel engaged with the world, and through which to celebrate agency is something that I aspired to many times in my life.

The clock is still ticking however.

I read a poem this morning.

In addition to sonnets I’ve been writing free-form poems.

I don’t know what you think of this post it seems quite random when I read back over its length, even though it’s not very long. I guess I’ll never know a lot of things, but that’s ok. In the end you’re only worth the memories you make in other people’s minds. In the end we all die, the secret is knowing what’s worth living for, perhaps I know. Perhaps you know. 

This day will never end.

The echoes of air traffic fill the morning, I can hear the jets and their whine, their roar, a sort of whoar crumbling the edges off 6.23am.

2 comments:

Basia Sokolowska said...

good post. It is ok to take a break form making art for the well of creativity to fill up. Art is definitely something that makes life worth living.

Anonymous said...

I love reading your posts although I have been away for six of your nine weeks, so very impressed what I’ve just seen in your next post. Not idle at all! 👏